Sunday, May 4, 2014

I went to the Peace House Stomp, a square dancing fundraiser for the local Catholic Worker House organization on Friday night. I dressed up as a cowgirl and even danced a few. Here is my get-up. And, to my knowledge, I was the only one who wore a cowboy hat.

Wish I had some action shots of the dance, but maybe I'll get some later.

The Kalamazoo Peace House provides tutoring and extracurricular activities to the children in the Eastside Neighborhood of Kalamazoo. Jerry, Molly, Mike, and Jen are all graduates of Kalamazoo College and committed to social justice. Congratulations to Peace House for a successful and fun event!!

On Sunday I walked the 5K "race" at the Kalamazoo Marathon where there were over 8,000 participants. What a huge success at this well-organized event. Congratulations Borgess Medical Center for putting on such a wonderful community event.

Now it's time to relax and continue working on my writing jobs--and watch Tiger baseball.

My next walk is at the Kalamazoo Memorial Day Parade where I will march with the Kalamazoo Women in Black, which advocates for peace as it mourns victims of war and violence.

Saturday, May 3, 2014

I
had an opportunity to participate in the CROP Walk in Kalamazoo on
Sunday, April 27. I was among 400 people from area churches who
raised funds for the hungry in this annual Church World Service
event. As I collected over $2600 from parishioners at St. Thomas
More Parish after each of the four Masses, I began to see the walk
not only as a fundraiser to help the hungry, but as a spiritual
endeavor, specifically, a pilgrimage.

According
to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a pilgrimage is a “journey
to a shrine or other sacred place undertaken to gain divine aid, as
an act of thanksgiving or penance, or to demonstrate devotion.”
Rebecca Solnit in her book,
Wanderlust: A History of
Walking, says
that there are three gracesthe pilgrimage
can evoke that
lead to transformation: (1)
community; (2) health and healing; and
(3) suffering. The American form of pilgrimage has also included
fundraising for various causes as
a practical way of directly doing something for others.
Since I decided that I was on a pilgrimage during
the the five-mile CROP Walk,
I reflected on what it meant
to me and how it transformed me.

First,
as a representative of the parish, I felt I was helping parishioners
remain conscious of the presence of hunger in our country,
our world, and in our local
community. Since not everyone wants or can go on the walk, my
participation allowed more
people to participate in the
cause through their
donations.
As a result, I
felt trusted to collect parishioners' money, send it to CROP, and to
remain true to my pledge to complete the five-mile walk. Trust is an
essential part of a strong and stable community.

In
a community people rely on one another to fulfill all the necessary
tasks that they cannot always
do themselves.
In this way the mission and purpose of the community endures.
Feeding the hungry is one of the things Jesus charges
us
to do in the Beatitudes. Through my walk and parishioners'
donations, we were
ministering to God's people.

Since
1947 the CROP Hunger Walk has
helped to provide food, water, and other resources (seeds, tools,
wells, water systems, technical training, micro-enterprise loans)
that empower people all over the world to meet their own needs and to
identify their own development priorities. In addition, because each
local CROP Hunger Walk can choose to return up to 25 percent of the
funds it raises to hunger-fighting programs in its own community,
parishioners'
donations helped the following Kalamazoo organizations:

Community
on my pilgrimage was
manifested in other ways. By walking through one
of Kalamazoo's poor
communities
(the Northside Neighborhood), I become more aware of the signs of
hunger: empty alcohol bottles, broken glass, unkempt homes and
streets, the presence of police cars, worn out houses
and streets, vacant lots
full of weeds. Hunger was
also evident through some
of the people we saw on the
walk; they were extremely
overweight because they must
rely on cheap fast food that
lacks nutritional quality and packs hundreds of nonessential calories
into each of its meals. Thus,
poverty in our city became
more visible to me because I was
in its
midst instead of whizzing
past it
in my car unnoticed.

Walking
also provided an
opportunity to interact with both the
participants on the walk and
the people from
the neighborhood. My fellow walkers and I caught up on news, helped
each other cross the streets safely, and provided congenial
fellowship. We were all aware of
our cause and we were working on it together.
This
was very satisfying. Equally
satisfying was the opportunity to interact with some of
the people in
the neighborhood for whom we were undoubtedly
walking. Weexchanged
smiles
and waves
as we passed
by, some of them joined the walk for a time while others
talked with us. In other words, we were walking among the poor and
perceivingour community more broadly
than we usually do. This
opened
up the possibility for
transformation.

Transformation
came to me in different ways. There is no doubt that the walk was a
healthy, physical thing to do. I felt good being outside in the
fresh air, and I felt good doing
Jesus' work.
While I realize that I'm not eradicating hunger, I'm conscious that
I'm at least doing
something
about hunger rather than nothing—and giving parishioners the
opportunity to
do something as well through
their donations. This
thought was empowering because I came to realize that I could not
only walk for those less fortunate than I
was, but we
could together
help the poor in our community. We as
church people were giving of
ourselves, ministering to others, and witnessing to the Church for
a very important cause that we don't often encounter.
This also stirs up the need
to know more about hunger, so
here are
some facts about hunger in America (https://www.dosomething.org)?:

1 in 6 people in
America face hunger.

Households with
children reported a significantly higher food insecurity rate than
households without children in 2011. 20.6 percent vs. 12.2 percent.

Food insecurity
exists in every county in America. In 2011, 17.9 million households
were food insecure.

50.1 million
Americans struggle to put food on the table.

In the US, hunger
isn’t caused by a lack of food, but rather the continued
prevalence of poverty.

More than 1 in 5
children is at risk of hunger

Among
African-Americans and Latinos, it’s 1 in 3.

Over 20 million
children receive free or reduced-price lunch each school day. Less
than half of them get breakfast and only 10 percent have access to
summer feeding sites.

For every 100
school lunch programs, there are only 87 breakfast sites and just 36
summer food programs.

1 in 7 people are
enrolled in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Nearly
half of them are children.

40 percent of food
is thrown out in the US every year, or about $165 billion worth. All
of this uneaten food could feed 25 million Americans.

These seven states
have statistically higher food insecurity rates than the US national
average (14.7%):

Mississippi
(19.2%)

Texas (18.5%)

Arkansas (19.2%)

Alabama (17.4%)

Georgia (17.4%)

Florida (16.2%)

North Carolina (17.1%)

Finally,
the pilgrimage, although
short in time and distance,
involved a certain amount of suffering just as it is
supposed to represent Jesus'
walk
to Calvary. I am used to walking three miles at a time, however,
the last mile of my five-mile goal proved to be more of a challenge
than I expected. My muscles from the waist down ached, and
that last half mile
especially made me doubt my ability to complete my goal. Thankfully,
my feet didn't hurt, and the
weather was cooperative, nevertheless,
I felt the need to press on because I gave parishioners my word that
I would walk five miles. During that last half mile I realized I
could
not totally act on my own power. I was too tired for that. Instead,
I asked God to help me finish—and God delivered. This is a new
approach to faith that I learned over Lent and was now
putting into practice on my
pilgrimage. Really, it is
very simple: whenever
I need something, anything,
I can ask God for help. The
only catch is that I must
have faith that God will deliver. An
extension of this belief is that as
a community we don't have to do everything all by ourselves, we have
God and each other to
support and inspire us to
get a
job done. As
one who typically tries to do everything myself, this small
act of faith proved to be a great revelation, and
it was through the
pilgrimage thatI came
to see and to practice my
faith in a new, more
spiritual way.

Walking
for CROP has made
me more aware of the hunger that
exists in my own local
community as well as throughout my country, and
it motivates me to do
something about it. My
community has also
been broadened to
include the hungry in my
prayers,
and to feel more
responsible for them. This gets
me thinking about what can be done to
alleviate hunger—and to
have the faith that it can be done, with others.